


Starlight and Shadows

by ashkatom



Series: 100 Follower Ficathon [10]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Post-Sburb/Sgrub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-16 20:36:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/866349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashkatom/pseuds/ashkatom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade Harley is having a hard time adjusting to being a God of the new world. They all are, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starlight and Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> Promptfic! This one's for g-isabellae, who wanted something gen with Aradia and Jade.

There is _so much_ to this new world that you had never dreamed of! To be fair, your entire world was an island and Prospit, then the game which sort of broadened your horizons – but this! There are so many people, and the world has a whole history to discover, and you couldn’t let your feet stop moving if you nailed them to the floor.

You blitz through the continents, starting with what you privately call New South America, twirl up and through New Europe, which has the largest troll population on New Earth, down through Africa where you visit Rose and Kanaya in Egypt and eat your weight in halawa. Talking to them makes it easier to not miss Bec by your side, but before too long you’re itching to go again. They take you out to a nearby souk and you disappear down one of the alleyways to reappear in a souk in Marrakesh. You feel a little bad about it, but you’re awful at goodbyes and they’ll understand, especially if you send them something cool.

It’s lonely, travelling like you do, and you will be the first to admit that! You make lots of temporary friends wherever you go, because godhood was kind enough to bless you with languages as well as awesome planet juggling powers, but it’s nothing like being with Rose and Dave and John, and while you’re used to Karkat being a wall of grey on your phone even his tirades seem more distant as you skip your way over seas and plains. Your world was small and enforced by ocean when you were little, and now you don’t have any boundaries at all – that you’ve found, at least.

You think it might be because you’re the Witch of Space. Kanaya doesn’t seem to get itchy feet like you do, but Sylphs are pretty passive! You feel like you have to know this new Earth-ternia from the melty core all the way up through the crust and oceans. People have already started praying to you, starting with strangers who’ve seen you _bomf!_ out of or into a place, now travellers and people looking for adventure. The feelings tingle at you in your dreams when you’re on the precipice between sleeping and waking and just fuel your wanderlust further.

You talk to Dave about it one day when it’s butts o’clock in (New) Houston and a bright noon in (New) Sydney, sitting in a lookout at Sydney Harbour Park. The skyline looks strange with the mix of Alternian and human architecture, although you’re one of the only people that would think so. Once you asked an anthropologist about what the world would be like without trolls and he gave you the weirdest look!

GG: its really weird!! im okay with the restlessness but hearing peoples prayers is just strange  
GG: too personal you know??  
TG: shit harley at least you arent the god of oh fuck oh please just one more minute fuck please please  
TG: i just realised that sounds suggestive but on the level its actually really fucking sad  
TG: people really want one more whatever with g-ma before she shuffles off the mortal coil  
TG: godhood sucks txt it  
GG: texted!!! :B  
GG: sometimes i wonder if its the game playing one last joke on us  
GG: like, hey fuckasses, pull your big girl panties back up because shit just got real and this is what youve actually been working for!  
TG: we agreed no talking like karkles harley dont make me confiscate your middle fingers  
GG: a real lady can cope without!  
GG: but really doesnt it kind of feel like weve been training to be caretakers  
GG: like im meant to know the earth and youre helping people with time like always and johns doing whatever he does and rose is meddling in dark forces better left alone  
TG: shit did she get into the grimdark cookie jar again  
GG: worse  
GG: ...........  
GG: politics!  
GG: i think shes doing creepy puppet ruler things and schmoozing over the continent  
GG: but my point! is!  
GG: doesnt it feel like we should do something  
TG: shit harley  
TG: what  
TG: its not like i can stop people from keeling over or be their very own missed connections hookup database  
GG: i dont know  
GG: i guess were still learning

You turn the screen of your phone off out of battery-saving habits and look out across the water. You know how many buildings there are in the business district without counting. You haven’t been able to get lost once since you got spat out on this planet! If you think about it you know the composition of the earth below you, your distance from the equator, you can feel how fast the planet is spinning under your feet and the complex forces that keep Earthternia in orbit and the moon where it is and the pull of the tides and there’s going to be a big solar flare next Tuesday and there used to be water on Mars once and Saturn’s rings are pretty from a distance but just dust up close and you wish you didn’t know all of these boring, normal secrets. Your island was smaller than the universe, but it held an infinite amount of little mysteries, and you wish you hadn’t grown up.

TG: earth to harley  
TG: earth is mia but sub in earthternia domain of the gods  
GG: sorry dave!! i got distracted by tides  
TG: jade harley ladies and gentletrolls  
TG: where is your god now  
GG: >:|  
TG: shut the front door that line was awesome  
TG: anyway you want knowledge of the place you should hook up with ray  
GG: aradia??  
TG: no my bro ray down the street he sells me weed and we game on thursdays  
TG: yes crazy troll time lord  
TG: shes into archaelogy and shit maybe you could work together and finally prove that god planted those fossils  
TG: i blame karkat  
GG: you would!!!!  
GG: ok fine  
GG: i havent seen aradia in ages anyway  
GG: chat later ok?  
GG: talk to rose!!  
GG has lost connection!  
TG: aw fuck you left before i could make a guilt trip pun  
TG: geddit  
TG: trip  
TG: travel  
TG: space  
TG: nevermind  
TG: i wasnt  
TG: in time  
TG: yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah

\--

Aradia is in a temple somewhere in Crete, which you are trying very hard to not think about because you still want a sense of excitement when you explore! She is standing next to an open glass case, carefully holding an old urn in gloved hands. When she hears you _bomf_ in, she looks up and favours you with a brilliant bright-red grin.

“Look!” she says, showing you the painting on the urn. “It’s meant to be the minotaur, like in your ancient myths, but look at the horns! It’s a definite cultural conflation and I bet it means that trolls were historically rare and feared-”

“They look like Feferi’s horns!” you say, which is about the most informed observation you can make on the old pot. Your domain is space! You could tell her where it was found except you’re pretty sure it’s already on the little placard thing under the glass case.

“Not Feferi’s,” she says, “Condesce’s. And they were put on a _fearsome_ thing so it’s not like the painter thought trolls were friendly. There must have been some degree of contact between the races historically if they knew to fear Condesce, though.” She flips the urn casually in her hands, like it’s not ten bazillion years old – which you guess it isn’t! The big cosmic joke is that everything is only a year or so old for you guys. You’re not sure how old it is for everyone else, if the world has just been waiting for you to step through the door or if it all came into being when the door was opened. Dave likes the latter theory since it means he gets to make dumb fossil jokes. You’re not sure which one you like. You _would_ like to know which one is real!

“We should go, though,” Aradia says, gently easing the jar back into its case. You feel time tug at space the way it always does, which is super annoying, and the case seals itself back up. “I didn’t exactly get permission to handle the antiquities,” she says, as the case’s time catches back up with standard time and an alarm starts blaring. Without hesitating, Aradia grabs you by the elbow and pulls you along as she runs out of the temple and through some back alleys, exchanging cheerful Greek profanities with a number of passers-by – or standers-around, more like.

“Wow,” you say, leaning against a wall some time later with your hands braced on your thighs. “Aradia!”

She grins at you and digs into her shoulderbag, coming up with a grubjelly sandwich that makes your stomach growl. “I’ll share if you promise not to tell,” she says, and waves the sandwich under your nose.

You bite it out from her hand. “I coulb haff-” you wiggle your fingers to indicate _bomf_ , “-ush oub of there.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” she says, sensibly, and digs out another sandwich.

\--

Aradia is _strange_. You didn’t get to know her very well in the game, since she was off being a time fairy and you went a little grimbark and then it was really just a rush to the end, but you’re pretty sure that not all the trolls are like this! Karkat is down to earth, and Kanaya is sweet with a little bit of hardcore thrown in, and... you don’t know the others, really. But Aradia? So far you’ve been cheerfully entreated to six theories on the history of this world with pauses to make examples of troll-human hybrid skeletons from a long long time ago.

You _love_ it. You’re having more fun than ever! Time isn’t your thing but it’s adjacent to your thing and she grounds you, kinda. When she delivers the skull of a proto-seadweller into your hands, frozen in time so you don’t damage it, you can feel the weight of history behind it, where it’s been and how far it’s come from what it was.

“I think it might be belief,” Aradia says, putting the skull back in the museum’s display case before giving it a fond pat. “Obviously none of this happened!” she says, gesturing at the evolutionary charts showing the co-evolution of trolls and humans. “We can’t breed together at all, our systems are just way too different.”

“At some point they weren’t, at least here,” you say, and gesture to the artists’ renditions of the trollman (hutroll) you have dubbed Becrel. You miss Bec more than you can admit, sometimes.

“Oh, those,” Aradia says, waving a hand. You are having a picnic in the middle of the Smithsonian at midnight. Always at midnight, in fact, because Aradia paused time for everyone but you so the guards wouldn’t interrupt. “It’s not real.”

“Seems pretty well peer-reviewed to me,” you say, and down your glass of juice. “I can feel them! I can feel where they came from and how they’ve settled into being what they are.”

Aradia shakes her head. She’s wearing what you think of as troll clothes, a plain black shirt with her symbol and a long grey skirt with dirt and holes in it. Wedged precariously between her horns is her adventuring hat. “It’s all too perfect, timeline-wise,” she says. “They’re dead. Inert, maybe, is a better word. There was never a time when they were alive.”

“Oh,” you say. For some reason that strikes you as unutterably sad, that all of these things are just another game backdrop to your new world. You wonder what you would have found if you’d dug back into Earth’s history. You want to believe in dinosaurs and meteorites and little sea amoebas being really angry and crawling onto land. Being a god makes everything feel less real, less immediate. You’re having a picnic in the _Smithsonian_. You want to wake up and see Jadebot next to you and go water your garden even if the pumpkins never seemed to come in.

Aradia frowns, her lips pursing at the look on your face. “I’m sorry?”

You have to scrub angrily at your eyes, because there is a time and a place for acting like Jadesprite and that is not now or here! “Just a little homesick, I guess!” you say, and your voice barely wobbles at all. “Sometimes I wonder why we’re even here. There was always a purpose before this, you know? I was a Prospit dreamer so I dreamt the future and then I had to make it happen and then there was the game and now there’s just _this_.”

Aradia looks around the room when you throw your hands out, the shadows casing most of the exhibits in gloom, you two in one bright spot from a little starlight you convinced should be in this room. “I was dead,” she says, off the cuff. “It felt like I was chained to the fate of our planet. Even if this seems a little unreal, I much prefer it.” She squeezes your hand and you hiccup, then laugh at yourself. She grins in response. “Even if this history is a little fake, so what? It’s now that’s interesting.”

Laughter spills out of you. “You’re the one that likes all this history so much!” you accuse.

“Sure.” Aradia pushes her hair out of her face before lying down on the picnic blanket she insisted on bringing. “You’re not the only one that gets homesick. I used to go on digs for fun when I was alive first. Sollux would come with me sometimes and complain _all the time_ even if I let him have his palmtop.”

You think of collecting frogs with Dave, and for the first time, laugh about it. You flop down beside Aradia and laugh more, and if a couple of tears leak out then that’s okay too.

“So you’re looking for remnants of troll culture?” you ask, after a long and comfortable silence. You like companionable silences. It reminds you of when you were little and would sit with Grandpa and Bec.

“Mmm,” Aradia says, and holds up her hands, palms to the ceiling. “Alternia was as familiar to me as the backs of my hands,” she says, and wriggles her fingers. She’s beautiful, in this soft, flickery light, you think. Not in a _crush_ way, but in a _wow my friends are gorgeous_ way, and it makes you smile. “Not knowing all about this world is a challenge. It’s like being thrown into an ocean and told to swim.” Her hands close, and she drops her arms to her chest. “Terrifying.”

You take her hand and close your eyes, thinking of how large the world is and how small you feel in comparison.

\--

TG: jade  
TG: jade  
TG: jade  
TG: look i said your name three times now youre meant to show up and gouge my eyes out  
TG: which you cant because of my highly practical and stylish eyewear so jokes on you bloody mary i am just too much of a suave motherfucker to be tripped up by this urban legend shit  
TG: bitch please i read tv tropes  
TG: anyway wtf is ray-z doing thats tied you down for long enough that you cant respond to any of my four hundred emails  
TG: are you leaving me for that homewrecker is that what this is do we need to go on jherey spignr because baby i will do anything for you i can change just come home w/ me babe were gonna be ok i swear  
GG: dave i am flattered!!   
GG: ...  
GG: did you send me the ganderbulb of arjgon split into four hundred and thirty-one emails  
TG: i was bored  
TG: theres one real email in there somewhere  
TG: just let me know y/n when you find it  
TG is offline!

\--

GG: you sent me four hundred and thirty-one emails to ask if i was coming to the CHRISTMAS PARTY?????!?!?!  
TG: sssh harley ssh calm your interrobangs we have to be culturally sensitive  
TG: its dumbfuck grasshairs holy birthday  
TG: not xmas  
GG: >:|a does this mean i need to get him two presents??

\--

This is the first Dumbfuck Grasshair’s Holy Birthday party you’ve had, since you all just missed the last one when you got spat into the world, but you hope it’ll be a tradition. No matter how itchy your feet get you always want a home to come to, and your friends are your home now! You think the trolls alive feel the same way about Karkat, who nearly pops a vein when he’s informed that it’s totally not a Christmas party.

Your friends seem different. All of them. Rose is even more mysterious and aloof than she used to be, John seems constantly about to drift away, Dave blurs a little all the time. The trolls seem no different, but you catch them looking at Aradia every so often, and it’s the final proof that being the gods of this world is changing each of you incontrovertibly. It still doesn’t stop you from hugging everyone, but it adds more to the worry and the feel of losing your family.

You give everyone presents, things you picked up in your travels with and without Aradia. Karkat gets sickles from Japan and a hug (you whisper ‘password!’ in his ear to make him grind his teeth (and remind you that you all haven’t changed that much)), Rose and Kanaya get fancy wine that you’re all technically too young for but you think that ship has sailed, John gets a kite the colour of his eyes you found in a garage sale in Massachusetts. Dave gets a hardbound copy of The Ganderbulb of Arjgon beaned at his head, which he snatches out of the air and seems genuinely taken by. Terezi gets an old rapier you found in an antiques store in London that T4ST3S L1K3 JUST1C3. Sollux you give something you picked up on Aradia’s suggestion: one of those interlocking puzzles that has two identical pieces. It doesn’t pose much of a challenge to him, but he separates it and puts it back together again all through the night, an unconscious habit of fiddling satisfied.

You couldn’t think of anything for Aradia, but she seems happy just to be at the party with everyone, laughing and telling anecdotes. Dave sits down beside you on one of Rose’s couches before cracking the most egregious fake yawn you have ever seen and stretching his arm around your shoulders.

“Sup, Harley,” he says, looking at you over his sunglasses.

You nudge him with your shoulder. “Sup, cooooooolkid!”

“Life of the party, as usual,” he says, splaying his hands to indicate the precise amount of bitches in his lap. “How’ve you and Ray-Z been?”

You roll your eyes. “Because I wasn’t just talking to you about my awesome travels, jeeeez.” You dig his phone out of his pocket – _whoa harley hands off the merchandise_ – and open Instagram, which is full of ironic selfies. With a couple of button presses you make him follow your account. “There, now you can get updates as they happen!”

“Hot,” he says. You punch him in the shoulder. “Seriously, though. I’m glad you aren’t as lonely as you were before you got your sexy Trolldiana Jones travelbuddy.”

You sigh and lean your head on Dave’s shoulder, making the arm of your glasses dig into your face. “We’re all lonely, huh?”

“Give it time,” Dave says, and you’re inclined to take his word on the subject!

\--

“I like parties,” Aradia confides in you afterwards, stretching from the tips of her toes to the ends of her fingers. “Even funerals. Especially funerals!”

“You put the fun in funeral?” you say, because Dave is a really bad influence.

Aradia laughs and laughs and laughs, wheezing with it and grabbing your shoulder for support. “Yeah! I just never saw the point of being sad, between me and Sollux we’ve died like sixteen times, at some point it’s just – okay, you’re gone, but you still make me laugh and cry and remember.”

“Yeah,” you echo, looking out at the night sky. You know no matter how hard you look, Earth won’t be there, and neither will Alternia. Neither will Skaia! But they all still make you laugh and cry and remember, and all the important bits are here with you. You still want to go everywhere and do everything, but it’s time to focus on this world, instead of the world that came before it. “Aradia?” you say, the prayers of all the very real denizens of this planet a constant susurrus just out of hearing.

“Mmm?” she says, turning her head to you. She’s starlight and smiles and good ideas and you are so, so happy to know her.

“Do you get prayers?” you ask.

“All the time,” she says. “Help me fix things, help me fix things, help me fix things.”

You turn fully towards her, almost shyly, clasping your arms behind your back. “Want to start fixing things?”

With a solemn air, she pulls her adventuring hat out of her sylladex and fixes it in place between her horns. “Sounds like a plan.”


End file.
